Two problems
1 What’s Hecuba to him?
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| Hecuba Blinding Polymnestor, by Giuseppe Maria Crespi. Thanks to the Web Gallery of Art |
Suppose someone tells you of a terrible misfortune that has just overwhelmed them, describing the circumstances in vivid detail, so that you cannot help - unless you are made of stone - sharing their anguish. They then tell you that they were putting it on. How do you react? Does the anguish persist or switch off? There’s likely to be a sense of anticlimax. After all there is nothing to be anguished about. Similarly if you have a scare, such as coming into an empty house and feeling that someone is lurking, then after a thorough search realise there was no one, the fear goes away.
Compare two situations:
(a) you are in a crowd watching a man being disembowelled
(b) you are in a crowd watching as an old man is bound and then has his eyes
gouged out
Situation (a): you are present at a public execution
Situation (b): you are in the audience at a performance of King Lear, the scene
where Cornwall puts out the eyes of Gloucester.
These are both horrifying. Certainly they are not entirely similar. For example
you don’t have the same thoughts and feelings afterwards. At the time however
they may be very similar - in either you may not be able to look. Even at the
time there is the important difference that at the play you have no impulse
to intervene. But that makes it all the more strange that you feel horrified.
You don’t intervene because you know that this is not for real. Why doesn’t
that knowledge defuse the emotion as well as the motive to act?
And why is the emotion defused in the cases of deception or false alarm that
I sketched, but not in the King Lear case?
This is the problem of how we can be moved by what we know to be fiction.
2 Negative emotions
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Olivier as Lear Thanks to John Webb's Guide |
An old man is turned out in a stormy night by his own daughters, goes stark mad, and after having apparently been rescued and restored by his only loving daughter sees her killed before his eyes. Hearing this you would have to be callous to be unmoved, cruel to feel pleasure. The emotions that are evoked in normally compassionate people by events of this kind are unpleasant. Yet normally compassionate people will even pay quite a lot to go and see King Lear performed. Aristotle defines tragedy as an imitation of an action designed to evoke pity and terror. Yet the experience of a tragic drama is pleasurable.
Music can also involve negative emotions: ‘intense grief, unrequited passion, sobbing melancholy, tragic resolve, angry despair’ (see Levinson in Feagin and Maynard p. 328). Think of the blues: the music of the abandoned, the despised, and the dejected.
Painting too. Picasso’s Guernica expresses the pity and terror of war - a large reproduction of it in the UN building was shrouded when Colin Powell was to address the Security Council on the case for military action against Iraq.
In drama, poetry, prose fiction, music and painting we can experience such
negative emotions as pity, fear, grief, sorrow, horror. How come we can derive
pleasure from the experience?
Emotions are complex. They have sometimes been thought of as conscious states
that have a peculiar felt quality that we can discern and identify by introspection,
in a way somewhat like the way we are aware of particular tastes. But that’s
not the whole story even if it is part of the story. What more?
• Emotions have objects. To be afraid is to fear someone or something; to be
angry is to be angry with someone about something
• Emotions have
a cognitive aspect. To be afraid is to believe that there is a possibility of
being harmed by something or someone; to be angry is to believe that one has
been injured in some way by someone or something
• Emotions incorporate a desire (more or less specific). To be afraid is to
have a desire to avoid the anticipated danger; to be angry is to desire to retaliate
in some way
• Emotions have characteristic physical sensations. Fear involves churning of
the gut; anger feeling hot in the chest and choked
• Emotions have characteristic external signs. In fear a person goes white and
trembles; in anger becomes red and tense
• Emotions produce characteristic actions, which may be inhibited or given free
rein. Fear runs (unless you’re a hedgehog); anger strikes
This account does not apply to all emotions. In particular it doesn’t apply to moods, such as melancholy or cheerfulness, though even moods probably have some sort of cognitive element, a generalised thought that all is well or that everything is grim.
In my last I drew attention to the fact that my response to another’s emotion is typically a different emotion: your grief at the death of friend or lover evokes in me not the sorrow of bereavement but pity or commiseration; the object of my emotion is not the same as the object of yours: you are grieving over your loss, I am grieving over your grief. That is an example of an emotion having another emotion as its object.
Susan Feagin draws attention to the fact that it is possible, in fact common,
for a person to have emotional responses to his or her own emotions. (Feagin
and Maynard p.306). I may be shocked by finding that I am aroused by erotic
photos, ashamed that I am terrified by a 
harmless
little spider, uneasy because I cannot feel the warmth of affection that yours
for me deserves, angry with myself for not feeling very grief-stricken over
someone’s death, proud of my good-tempered handling of a tricky situation. She
terms these ‘meta-responses’.
I have just reiterated the point that the response to the expression of emotion, whether in a work of art or in ordinary dealings with people, is not necessarily having the same emotion as the one being expressed, as Tolstoy’s account requires. At one extreme I may just think ‘She’s angry’; I know what anger is and can recognise that that is the emotion the person is expressing. But I don’t deny that at the other extreme there is the situation that Tolstoy describes. That occurs when I am in total sympathy with the other’s anger and become angry myself about the same thing - the anger is shared. But there are other responses between these. One is where one partially identifies with the other person, to the extent of trying to imagine what it is like for her, and perhaps succeeding to some degree. There are degrees of imaginative identification, and one way of achieving a high degree is to make the expression ones own. This is akin to the way that an actor gets inside the skin of a character. Enactment realises the emotion. R.K. Elliott develops this idea with great subtlety in ‘Aesthetic Theory and the Experience of Art’ (Feagin and Maynard pp. 278-88).
The expression theorists recognized that a poem can be perceived not as an
object bearing an impersonal meaning but as if it were the speech or thought
of another person and that it is possible for us to make this expression our
own. A work may be experienced ‘from within’ or ‘from without’. . . So far as
poetry and painting are concerned, experiencing a work from within is, roughly
speaking, experiencing it as if one were the poet or the artist. If a work is
experienced as expression, experiencing from within involves experiencing this
expression after a certain imaginative manner as one’s own’
As Elliott himself maintains, experiencing the expression from within is not
actually being in the emotional state of which it is the expression. There is
an analogy with belief. I may entertain a proposition, rehearsing its meaning,
saying it to myself, imagining being in the state of mind of someone whose belief
it would express. I am so to speak trying it out. One can almost get oneself
to believe that one believes it. All the same that isn’t the same as believing
it. In the case of emotion Elliott goes so far as to say that one feels the
emotion, of sadness or anger say, while yet it would be false to say that one
is sad, or angry.
3 different ways of ‘taking’ a poem:
a ‘as an object bearing an impersonal meaning’
b as someone’s expression emotion
c as though it were my expression
Music can be experienced as sound, as expression, or as my expression. Hearing the music as expression need not be to hear it as the expression of anyone in particular, but to experience it from within is to imagine it issuing from within oneself. (See Levinson’s paper for a fuller account along these lines, and for its application specifically to the problem of negative emotions)
Experiencing painting from within involves viewing the painting not as an object in ones visual field, but as constituting ones visual field. I am the viewer of the scene and responding to it with agitation or serenity or what not.
In the lecture on representation I gave a brief account of Kendall Walton’s theory of representation. Taking a hint from Gombrich he develops the theory that experiencing a work of art is constructing and entering into a world of make-believe, similar to the worlds of make believe that children construct. The relevant point for us is his observation that participation in the make-believe world is psychological as well as active. Quote 291-2
In fictional works we imagine being informed about the events that bring good or bad fortune, and become part of a make-believe world in which we sympathise with the fate of the characters.
An adequate analysis of emotion is fundamental to their solution. Probably the most important feature of the analysis offered is the cognitive aspect. Acknowledging this seems at first sight to help with the problem of negative emotions, but to make the problem of emotional responses to fiction more difficult. Feeling sad about some tragic event is unpleasant partly or even largely on account of the belief that e.g. someone one cares about is injured. In responding to a dramatic presentation (or a narrative, or visual depiction or musical expression) of the event we do not have the belief. So one, perhaps the main, source of displeasure is removed. The problem with this is that it seems that the removal of the belief should remove the emotion altogether: it does so in the cases of emotions that turn out to be unfounded that I described at the outset. If that does not happen in fictional cases the difference needs to be explained.
The explanation may be different in different arts. Take music. With the exception of music that attempts to present a situation, a storm at sea, for example, or a battle, the emotion expressed in music does not have an object, and the cognitive aspect seems to be absent. Levinson suggests that what is left is just the feeling element of the emotion, that to hear music as though it were ones own expression enables one to experience the feeling, and to savour it in a way that is impossible in real situations that would evoke that emotion, and that to feel emotions in this way is not unpleasant and is rewarding.
It may be that a somewhat similar account could be given of the emotional response to non-figurative painting, in which the expressive power of a work depends entirely on colour and form. If a picture does not represent anything then it cannot express emotions which require the indication of an object in order to be understood, and correspondingly there is no object for the emotional response to fasten on. Figurative painting can express emotion in a way analogous to literary works, by representing scenes calculated to evoke certain emotions, and these scenes may be representations of real events, or they may be fictions. The emotional response to such works can involve thoughts about the events depicted.
Drama and narrative literature are the obvious paradigm cases of works in which we may respond emotionally to represented scenes and events. If these are fictional then emotional responses such as pity, terror, anger etc, which standardly involve beliefs (e.g that the aged Lear is misused by his daughters, etc) are problematic.
There are no such people. One knows there are not, so one does not believe that anyone is misused, and consequently it seems that one cannot be sorry for Lear or angry with Goneril and Regan. And yet one is - at least many people are. It seems quite natural to say things like ‘Poor old man; they treated him abominably’. So it looks as though we have a paradox: there are no such persons as Lear, Goneril and Regan, but it’s true that Goneril and Regan treat Lear abominably
Credits
Emotion pic thanks to Sabine Budin
Spider thanks to DVDDrama
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Last revised 16:03:05 |
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John Benson |
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A module of the BA Philosophy programme Institute of Environment Philosophy and Public Policy | Lancaster University | e-mail philosophy@lancaster.ac.uk |